I managed to borrow a processor that was known to be good - lo and behold, everything works as it should with that in place. I have a copy of PC Check and when I ran processor diagnostics it passed all tests (as can be seen here
Thanks to all who offered support and advice
Dave
There are loads of test programs out there, and a surprising number are actually quite poor at finding real world problems.
Thanks for letting us know the outcome. It was beginning to sound like it was definitely hardware related. While CPU failures are far less common than motherboard failures, they do happen sometimes (quite often triggered by fan failure or slowdown).
I used to write test programs.
It's very hard to find dodgy kit when you want it. Most things either work, or fail completely. It was over a year after I had written a memory test from examining the chip design that I first had feedback that it was actually doing something in the slow mode it didn't find in the quick 30-second test. I never did get hold of a flaky CPU.
Disks with flaws are of course easy to find.
Andy
Yup, done my fair share of "built in test" software as well. Very time consuming to actually get something sensitive enough to be useful, and not too trigger happy!
Not sure if it still applies to current versions, but the Mersenne Prime Search program "Prime95" had a "torture test" mode, which was one of the best apps I have found to really stress Windows machines. Its surprising the number of systems it would shake out faults on that would otherwise sail through most memory and CPU tests.
Hmm. Might leave that running. My work machine keeps telling me it's had corrected errors when I reboot it, but a weekend's windows memory tests found nothing.
(no, I can't use my code. It was written for a '286 and won't handle
8Gb. And I don't have a floppy to boot it from...)Andy
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